"Until recently, Algeria was the North African exception -- Article 74 of its 1996 constitution set two five-year terms as the limit on the mandate of a given president. On November 12, 2008, however, the parliament voted overwhelmingly to approve several constitutional amendments, the most important of which removed the stipulations of Article 74. This far-reaching amendment opened the way for President Abdelaziz Bouteflika to run for a third successive term, as he will do on April 9, despite his poor health and controversial performance. Algerians are convinced that, as in Tunisia or Egypt, the result of this election is a foregone conclusion.

Like Qaddafi, Bouteflika and his supporters have grounded their campaign for constitutional revision in notions of popular sovereignty. Because Algerians have elected Bouteflika twice, the regime’s story goes, they should not be hindered by a mere piece of paper like the constitution from keeping him around for life. Like its North African counterparts, the Algerian regime claims that it has jump-started economic development so remarkable that the people insist they remain in office to complete the task. Meanwhile, the removal of term limits has ended any semblance of constitutional checks and balances in Algeria."

Amidst massive apathy and rejection of this sham electoral process, Bouteflika has an interest in getting as high a turnout as possible to legitimize his continued rule as "the people's will." He recently plumbed new depths, as Le Quotidien d'Algerie reports, by urging the masses to get out the vote and "make him blush in front of the foreigners":

Yesterday, during his rally in Guelma, the president-candidate-president Bouteflika urged the populace to vote massively and to make him blush in front of international public opinion.Yes, yes! He said this exactly: "Make my face blush in front of the foreigners by going to vote in numbers!"In fact, the term hamrouli wadjhi in our Algerian dialect signifies exactly the opposite as the French expression. "Make my face blush" in Derdja (dialect) means "make me blush with pleasure," that is, "do not humiliate me by boycotting this election, but rather elect me by an overwhelming majority."Beyond the nuances of this discourse, we discover - we knew already - that the only thing that counts for Bouteflika and the regime that has backed him is international opinion. The Algerian people are the least of his worries. [We are] a couscous republic!

Issandr El Amrani is a Cairo-based writer and consultant. His reporting and commentary on the Middle East and North Africa has appeared in The Economist, London Review of Books, Financial Times, The National, The Guardian, Time and other publications. He also publishes one of the longest-running blog in the region, www.arabist.net.